


five, no six jobs Bruce may have had, had his parents lived

by duc



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: 5 Things, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-04
Updated: 2011-12-04
Packaged: 2017-10-26 21:56:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/288330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duc/pseuds/duc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>what it says on the tin</p>
            </blockquote>





	five, no six jobs Bruce may have had, had his parents lived

**Author's Note:**

> The very very kind Kirax2 agreed to look over my fic when she was already busy with her own. any mistakes left are my own.
> 
> I also want to thank everyone who answered my question on which job they prefered. Your comments were very helpfull, I would probably still be stuck without them. So thank you very much you all.
> 
>  
> 
> Disclaimer: Batman is the propriety of DC, I do not own the characters and don’t make any money from it.

  
****  
1/ Doctor.  
 

  
Like a lot of kids, Bruce idolises his father as a child. He is extremely proud that his dad is a doctor who heals people. When someone at home is sick or injured (be they staff, family or family of the staff) Thomas Wayne usually gets his bag from his study. Saves them a trip to the hospital. Some of Bruce's best childhood memories are of “helping” him. Carrying his bag, holding the pressure cuff or the stethoscope.... 

Once, he is visiting him at the clinic and waiting for him to finish an exam in the break room. Another doctor on a break jokingly hands him a medical journal to pass the time. Bruce takes it, finds an article that deals with body parts he actually knows and starts to read. That doctor spends her break answering all his questions about all the things he didn't get.

Everyone thinks it's adorable; no one is surprised when he follows in his footsteps.

At the clinic they call him Dr Bruce, to differentiate him from the older Dr Wayne. He is asked a few times if sometimes it bothers him, to be in his father's shadow. He doesn't see it as being in his father's shadow. For one thing, Thomas Wayne is a family doctor and Bruce an ER doctor. They are both generalists but one of them gets a little more adrenaline rushes than the other. For another he doesn't idolise his father anymore but still likes the idea of working in the same hospital. The way Bruce looks at it there is only one downside to his job.

 He loses his first patient during his internship. A man comes in in the middle of the night with a foot of steel rod sticking out of his neck. The rod is blocking his airway and it sectioned a major artery. If they leave the rod he will suffocate if they take it out he is likely to bleed to death. They send him to surgery and he bleeds to death. Afterward his father sits next to him, takes him in his arms and tells him all the things he already knows intellectually: That he did all he could. That there was nothing else to do, that you can’t save them all. It doesn’t help.

Bruce is not himself for weeks, even his work is not as enjoyable as usual. He is just as steady under pressure, just as ordered in the middle of chaos, but where he used to see a challenge to be solved he sees a potential failure. The intricacy of the human body, which used to be fascinating is now daunting. He recovers, eventually, but it takes a while and he never gets used to losing a patient. It hits him just as hard the second time, and the third time, and the time after that, and the time after that.

 

  
 ****  
2/ Olympic athlete.  


When Bruce is nine his phys Ed teacher does a segment on Judo. Like all his classmates he is excited. What nine-year-old wouldn't be? 

Two week after the beginning of the segment he goes home with a note from the teacher asking his parents for a meeting. Coach Anderson advises them to sign him up for real Judo classes. In his opinion, he has potential. 

Bruce, who never showed much interest in sport before, is euphoric. Like most children his age he likes the opportunity to grapple with other kids, but unlike most he is also interested in the techniques themselves, and his execution is a lot better than what you would expect of a nine years old beginner.

It changes him in the obvious ways; he loses the slight clumsiness he had, for example. And in deeper but less tangible ways. The energy that was going in all directions all at once before seems to recede to the confine of his body. Grounded and centered. His confidence level goes up, it his hard to say if his shyness goes away because he stays reserved but he has a new assurance that carries him with aplomb through trying new things and meeting new people. 

3 months later he has his first competition, he wins second place. It’s the first of many trophies. Over the years his interest never wanes, on the contrary it expands into other martial arts. By the time he graduates junior high he's training 3 hours a day, five days a week and wishing he could do more. He's competing at national level by then in several disciplines, and is heading toward international.

But what really makes him known to the people of Gotham is being selected for the Judo Olympic team at 17. That year he misses the podium by a inch. Four years later he wins silver, to people cheering everywhere in the city.

  


  
****  
3/ scientist  
 

Bruce has always been curious **.** _Very_ curious. From the time he learns to talk every adult in contact with him has to answer a barrage of questions. What is that, and why this, how does that… The only temper tantrums he ever throws are when he can’t get a satisfactory answer. There is a slight respite at 4 when he masters reading enough to be able to get the answers himself, but the grown ups of Wayne manor make an habit of keeping dictionaries, Atlases and encyclopaedias close at hand. 

By the time he is seven he has managed to take apart the TV and the radio, grow butterflies and other less savoury insects from larvae in his room, set fire to the kitchen and gets himself and Rachel stuck on the roof while mapping out the stars. 

At eight the semi ongoing debate with the school on whether or not he should skip a grade or two reaches a point where it can’t be ignored anymore. The fact that he is utterly bored and the fear of pushing him and robbing him of his childhood go back and forth a few times before a decision is reached. He ends up going directly from the third to the fifth grade.

At fifteen he enters the white tower of academia in the form of Princeton and never leaves.

15 years, 2 doctorates, one master, countless seminars and a detour by M.I.T and Oxford later his favourite saying is “The day you get old is the day you stop learning.“ Although he stops collecting the degrees. Bruce has a job in the Applied Science department of Wayne Company along with half a dozen patents to his name and a teaching position at Princeton. he is a respected author who publishes on a variety of subjects going from satellites, to water contamination to the use of the historical present in Indo-European epics.

 

  
 ****  
4/ Lawyer.  
 

Bruce is not one of those children who know what they are going to be when they grow up from the time they learn to walk. Sometimes he wants to be an astronaut, other times a doctor like his dad. It never lasts very long and there’s never any passion behind it. 

As a child he never thinks about it. As a teenager with university looming closer and closer toward him it starts to bother him more and more. It doesn’t help him decide that he is rich enough not to need a paying job and smart enough to get into anything. He graduates early and goes to Princeton with an open major. 

It’s not until two years later that he chooses. When it’s Rachel’s turn and they are sitting on the living room’s floor of the manor, flipping through pamphlets. Rachel wants to go into law and they are debating the merits of Gotham U versus Princeton when the news starts a feature covering the results of the trial of a mob enforcer who shot a recalcitrant shop owner in the head in the middle a busy street on a Saturday afternoon. The case is dismissed for lack of evidence. They look at each other and that is it. Rachel applies, Bruce transfers.

Now he has a drive he didn’t have before. Bruce, and by extension Rachel, had sheltered childhoods but Gotham is Gotham. You can’t grow up in Gotham and ignore what goes on the dark alleys and plush offices.

Martha and Thomas Wayne are doctor, engineer and socialites. They have always tried to help their city using the tools they had. It was always assumed, in Bruce’s head, that one day he would do the same. He has just found out how.

Rachel gets a job at the DA’s office. Through his grades and his name, Bruce gets offers from all big cabinets. He turns them all down and becomes a public defender. Harvey Dent gets elected DA. 

The three of them become a sort of team. No one, beside their cautiously optimistic families, gives them a fighting chance. The naïve idealists who thinks they can take on Gotham city. They’ll be gone before the year is out, people say, they won’t even last two months. But Gotham doesn’t belong to the corrupts. At the end of the year they are still there, and the year after that, and the year after that.

In the end they prove trickier and tougher than they look. They are not so easy to touch and their traps are not so easy to evade. They stay, Harvey and Rachel standing in for the law, Bruce giving a voice to those that would otherwise have been voiceless. 

 

  
 ****  
5/ Profiler  
  
It’s the school psychologist that suggests that Bruce take drama classes, but it is Alfred that actually overrides his initial resistance, born out of the justified suspicion that it is an attempt to “fix” him, and gets him to go with an open mind. 

It never gets him to be more sociable with people his own age, at least not until he reaches adulthood, but the class is a hit.

No one quite expected that he would be so good at it. That he is the first to learn his lines, along with the lines of everyone else, is not surprising to anyone who knows him. That he is so exuberant on the stage _that_ is unexpected. Bruce has always been shy, spirited within his small circle of close friends and family, but reserved outside of it. But on the stage he can be boastful, exuberant, calculating, sad, as it fits the character. It’s as if slipping into the life of someone else lifts a heavy weight from his shoulders and he is free. 

He has long discussions with Alfred, on different plays, the actions of the characters, the motivations of the authors. For a child who can have a hard time puzzling out basic social interactions when he is involved his insights are astonishingly accurate. 

As he becomes older his acting gets better to the point that he changes his whole body language and speech patterns. Even his mother has a hard time recognising him. He acts at amateur levels until he finishes high school, his parents not wanting him to enter show business too young. 

After he graduates he hesitates for a while before heading for New York. He also enrols in Columbia in psychology to have a second option. In the end he never joins any professional acting company. Not because he couldn’t get in, but because he is recruited by the F.B.I.

A few years later the GPD gets the funding for their own profiling division. Bruce resigns and is their first hire.

 

  
 ****  
6/ CEO  


 It cans seem obvious that Bruce would take an interest in his family’s company and succeed his father. Although if you know that Thomas Wayne was mostly a figurehead that focused on being a doctor with the occasional side project, maybe not so much.

It all starts with those side projects; they are often hatched at the dinner table with his father and Lucius Fox bouncing ideas off each others. As he gets older and his knowledge expend Bruce starts to volunteer his own ideas, then he starts getting involved in creating the prototypes. At 13, 14 he becomes a regular guest at Wayne Tower.

 It goes on for 2 years. Then Lucius starts to discuss other aspects with him and little by little Bruce discovers all the facets of a manufacturing company. Along with the fact that inventing or improving things is fun but that inventing things then producing them, marketing them, selling them and managing where the profits are going to go is even more interesting.

He is bit young to be an official board member but nobody objects to him attending meetings. Lucius learns that it is a good idea to send him to negotiate certain tricky deals. As most businessmen and women take one look at him, the great grandson of the man who actually founded the company, not even 20, and make unfortunate assumptions about his competence. Their mistake is Wayne Enterprise’s gain. The shade of red the German executives turn when they finally realise he is fluent is highly entertaining as well. 

At 18 he officially joins the board. When he is 23 his father steps down, joking that Bruce is more active than he ever was. His first act as CEO is to cut the ribbon of the new factory he built near the Narrows, creating 2,300 jobs.

 

 

 

  
 ****  
Side notes: Here are a few things about the different verses that I liked but couldn’t fit into the ficlets.  
   
Olympic athlete: Bruce eventually opens a dojo in Gotham. He trains police officers looking for an edge, youth of all backgrounds and dedicated martial artists. Among his students there are some, Barbara Gordon, Jason Todd and little Stephanie Brown that show great promise. The Olympics are going to be hearing about Gotham for long time.

Profiler: Bruce’s decision to become a law enforcer didn’t go smoothly. High society was buzzing, his parents were uneasy, and Bruce himself was sceptical. He turned to Alfred again for guidance. 

In Gotham, cops don’t quite know what to do with him at first but they warm up to him. They think he’s a nice kid if a little weird. Vice occasionally nabs him, against the explicit orders of Commissioner Loeb. Someone whose picture has been in Vanity Fair (most eligible bachelor list) shouldn’t be able to pull off undercover jobs.  
  



End file.
